The Kakeya conjecture sounds like a brain teaser. Place a needle flat on a table. How much area do you need in order to be able to turn it so that it points in all […]
Tag: quantamagazine
As soon as President Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 11, Massimo Pascale and his team sprang into action. Coordinating over Slack, Pascale, an astrophysicist at the […]
If you’ve been following the math news this month, you know that the 35-year-old number theorist James Maynard won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician. Maynard likes math questions that “are […]
Stripes of gas wind and wrap through the darkness, twisting into knots that are poised to collapse into stars. And it all happens in the palm of Nia Imara’s hand. The stormy clouds of gas […]
When Fu-Shuang Li, a biochemist and research scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, needed some pollen for his research, he knew just where to go. Every spring, the pitch pine trees ringing Walden […]
A striking new proof in quantum computational complexity might best be understood with a playful thought experiment. Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip […]
In 1850, Thomas Penyngton Kirkman, a mathematician when he wasn’t fulfilling his main responsibility as a vicar in the Church of England, described his “schoolgirl problem”: “Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out three […]
How can anyone speak with certainty about infinity? What can we really know about the mysterious prime numbers without knowing all of them? Just as scientists need data to assess their hypotheses, mathematicians need evidence […]
More than a century after Albert Einstein unveiled general relativity, his epic theory of gravity has passed every experimental test to which it has been subjected. General relativity has transformed our understanding of gravity, depicting […]
One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time into an organism with diverse tissues, each with its own unique […]
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